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Abigail lies to conceal her affair, and to prevent charges of witchcraft. She bears most of the responsibility for the girls meeting with Tituba in the woods, and once Parris discovers them, she attempts to conceal her behavior because it will reveal her affair with Proctor if she confesses to casting a spell on Elizabeth Proctor. In this paper, I will focus on what Žižek calls the sublime object as “negative magnitude” (1997: 81) to explore the logic of scapegoating – where the internal contradictions or antagonisms of a particular society are ideologically displaced onto an external figure of the Other – that we can chart from (at least) the Salem witch trials to the present day refugee crisis.Abigail Williams is the vehicle that drives the play. Reflecting the terrible fascination of the Thing, such an object may be venerated or, indeed, denigrated, like the totemic animal that is both worshipped and sacrificed in order to ensure the cohesion of the tribe or clan (Freud 1913). Moreover, Žižek’s theory relies specifically on Lacan’s most succinct definition of sublimation, as the elevation of the object “to the dignity of the Thing” (1992: 134), which we can understand here as the raising of something quotidian to a privileged position within the social fabric. And while it might, at first face, seem almost an error of category to examine the “sublime” in the context of a symposium on sublimation, it is worth noting that both Freud (1930) and Lacan (1992) emphasised the social function of sublimation. To this end, I will address Miller’s own adaptation of his stage play in Nicholas Hytner’s 1996 film, for the ways in which its formal strategies emphasise the key features of social conflict that drive persecution. Specifically, I intend to explore The Crucible in relation to Slavoj Žižek’s theory of the “sublime object of ideology” (1989).

However, for the purposes of this paper what I want to identify is the socio-political mechanism of sublimation at work both in the context of the production of The Crucible and within its narrative and staging. But secondly, and as allegory specifically, we could consider it a sort of sublimated political gesture: Miller’s protest against a modern-day witch hunt finding its expression in an alternative form.

As an allegory of McCarthyite anti-communist hysteria in 1950s America, the play could itself be considered a form of sublimation: firstly, of course, in the way that all creative works can be understood, in the Freudian context, as a diversion of the drives (1916-17). In 1952, Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible – a fictionalised staging of the 1692 Salem witch trials.